The Contemporary Genesis (part V)

Certainly,
there is a new springtime for mankind. A tragic spring, like all springs when
murder and rutting passion combine to increase and multiply the energy which
makes for fecundity. In these rebounding values, in this jumble of painting
where the forms drag the backgrounds with them confusedly, and where the
backgrounds reunite with space only after having brushed against the forms in
order to gather up their echo, I perceive a kind of artless genesis. Our
memories of Hindu art, of the "Paradise" of Tintoretto, of the entire
work of Rubens, of the myth of Evolution, the love for the great music which
has developed among us, Dostoievski, Nietzsche, Whitman, the awkward and
essential architecture of Cézanne, and the painted symphony gained by Renoir,
everything signifies the approach of some great agreement, unknown as to its
methods, but for which these dispersed forms which seek to rejoin one another
are a primitive appeal. The universe is remaking itself. The floating character
of the values of plastic art corresponds to the indecision of science, to the
fundamental instability of life which the biologists are revealing to us, to
its attempt to fix itself in an architectonic rhythm, and to a collective
defense against that instability. Whatever the opinions of an ephemeral
school—and every self-respecting school is ephemeral—painting retains space as
its domain, and will not escape from it. But the gradually increasing
importance which we give to time has stealthily introduced itself into our
former idea of space. The cinematograph causes it to be born and to die there,
to be reborn and to die again under our eyes, precipitating into the
counterpoint of universal and continuous movement that which painting, in
former times, fixed upon canvas: volumes, passages, values, associations,
oppositions, and contrasts—which modify one another, reply to one another,
interpenetrate, and become entangled, ceaselessly and in all the dimensions.
And now, everywhere and all the time, evolving and vague relationships of an
irresistible accent are being established.

Exhausted
by solitude, man, in a word, calls to man, in order together to build the
house, and the unemployed decorators consent to immolation in order to converge
their spiritual forces in the erecting of a temple which they will not see. The
new order, creating the new architecture, simple and bare like every organism
in its youth, will destroy decoration, or will transform it in such a manner
that its present attempts can teach us nothing as to the form which it will
assume [See Appendix (f)]. All the
things which, for twenty years, we have been thinking of as realizations, are
perhaps nothing more than symptoms; symptoms of a rebinding, symptoms of
concentration [Ibid. (g)]. The most
visible one is the increase in the spirit of association from which the social
framework will probably come forth. The war is a most cruel one. But also it is
perhaps the one which has had most influence in constraining us to look at
ourselves, face to face, and to look within ourselves. In reality, it is of
rather small importance that a great number of those who feel the universal
need for communion should go to ask of dead political systems the secret of the
new order. That is a symptom. It is a symptom also, and one of the most
impressive, that we see in the insistent effort which Germany has been making,
for a third of a century, to bring her triple hegemony, military, industrial,
and intellectual, into the single frame of an architectural style determined by
the will, a style whose simplicity is a pedagogical acquisition which has taken
its elements from abstraction and from the past [Ibid. (h)]. A symptom again is that audacity of the Americans in
erecting monstrous utilitarian constructions which shatter all known styles, in
the brutal rush toward the sky of their metal framework, and in their continual
effort to rise higher above the cities. And symptoms, above all, are those
rational forms which have issued from applied science, and which gayly thrust
into the ruins all the disordered habits, even though they call themselves the
traditional habits, of the art of building. A great mystery is being wrought.
No one knows whither it is leading us.

Here
are the tall chimneys like temple columns, the living animals of steel, with a
heart, intestines, nerves, eyes, limbs, iron bones articulated like a skeleton,
the turning, the sliding, the mathematical coming and going of belts, of
pulleys, of connecting rods, and of pistons; here are the rigid roads, shining,
and extending, and intersecting to infinity, and the silent round of
astronomical cupolas following the movement of the skies; here are the giant
halls, and the bare façades of the factories, cathedrals dedicated to the cruel
god who knows no other law than that of unbounded production. Here we see the
industries of war in agreement with the industries of peace, and, boiling with
them in the bloody crucible of the future, the marine monsters of metal, the
gigantic insects which fly with their harsh buzzing, the cannons which hurl
their drama more than twenty leagues, the armored dragons which crawl like
caterpillars, spitting flame and poison. . . All of that is clear cut, without
ornament, trenchant, categorical, and having the purity and the innocence of
the function indifferent to good, to evil, and to morality—of the function
which is being born, endowed with an appetite which is fierce, insatiable, and
joyous.